The Wellington City Council is consulting on its long-term plan, and one of the things they have proposed is cutting funding for Te Papa from $2.25m to $1.0m. This is a very stupid thing to do in my opinion.

Before I get to the substance, a note on process. The City Council only told Te Papa on the day of their Council meeting that they were proposing a funding cut of 56%. That borders on incompetence. You don’t pull surprises like that on institutions without warning. There should be regular communication on issues such as funding.

Now why is the Council trying to cut funding by 56%? It is because they are spending too much money elsewhere, and are trying to keep rates from increasing too much. I support keeping rates down, but the problem is not the long-standing funding to Te Papa, but all their new spending projects.

A key issues is that 70% of the Te Papa funding does not come from residential ratepayers but from the Downtown Levy. This is a levy on basically tourism businesses such as hotels, restaurants, bars and the like. The tourism sector are perfectly happy paying this levy. In fact they are up in arms that the Council is proposing a reduction. What the Council in fact is trying to do is to spend the Downtown Levy on general Council spending rather than Te Papa which generates an economic return.

How big an economic return do Wellington businesses get from having Te Papa in Wellington?

An economic assessment by Market Economics calculates a contribution to Wellington GDP of $91m a year. 50% of all visitors to Wellington visit Te Papa. On average there are 560,000 international visitors a year. 14% of domestic tourists and 4.7% of international tourists cite Te Papa as the main reason they came to Wellington. This represents a tourism spend in Wellington of $58.9m.

You can see why tourism businesses are so happy to pay the levy, and are pissed off at the Council for cutting it.

At an absolute minimum the Council must keep the $1.575, funding from the downtown levy going.

Is there a case for the other $675,000, which comes from ratepayers? Well 450,000 of Te Papa’s visitors are from within Wellington Region. It is used extensively by locals. But further because Wellington is lucky enough to have Te Papa here, we probably spend less on other galleries and museums.

The WCC spends $8.4m on museums and galleries (excluding Te Papa) which is $18.72 per person in the region. If one includes the other Councils, it will be more, but not massively so as most of the institutions are in Wellington City. Auckland Council spends $56.2m which is $37.82 per person in their region. I think Wellington ratepayers do pretty well out of the $675,000 they are being asked to fund Te Papa.

So I hope Councillors do the right thing and reverse the spending cut. Not because I am against spending cuts. But because Te Papa brings in a huge amount of tourism revenue, and cutting tourism spending is a false economy.

What is interesting is that almost all the Councillors generally seen as on the right are against cutting Te Papa’s funding – because they understand that economically it is a silly thing to do. The Councillors who have been voting in favour of cutting the funding have generally been from the left – including the three Green Councillors (including the Mayor). Is it because the Greens want less tourists to come to Wellington as it is “bad” for the Environment?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2012 at 12:00 pm and is filed under New Zealand, NZ Politics.
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At this time time society simply doesnt have the money to spend on culture and related things. Everyone has to cut back – and that goes for places like Te Papa as well.

These bodies who take public money are very slow to get the message.

Here in the waikato there are plans to expend libraries at great cost. Theyre stupid. What they need is many fewer books and a couple of internet terminals. No one looks up the encylopedia anymore – they go to the net. Especially for reference book material. And many cases it would be cheaper to dump library fees and put ones money to kindle books.

Times are a-changing.

Did you hear the one about they guy sitting on the sidewalk out side his house with a stack of the latest World Book beside him. He hald up a sign that said:

“latest issue of world book for sale
– going cheap.
No longer needed
as wife knows everything”

Well, having been to Wellington and visited Te Papa, my only contribution would be that it’s way over rated at the price. It’s “nice”, but very “Wellington”. That is, pretentious, over-rated, and largely paid for by someone else. I can’t now imagine making the trip from even, say, Porirua to Wellington just to go there.

Exactly. Local government politicians and managers, like those in central government, have a sense of entitlement that all money they gather from the community should be theirs to spend. They hate money being given out to others, no matter how strong the argument. Without scrutiny their instincts are to use all available funds to employ more bureaucrats, in turn adding to their own status

He states that tourism operators are happy to pay for Te Papa, if true they dont need the intermediation of the WCC they can just fund it directly. I doubt very much that tourism operators are “happy to pay” if they weren’t forced by the levy.

Obviously ratepayers arent “happy to pay” because their rates are also extracted by force.

The only people “happy to pay” are those who freely whip out their admission fee and their clearly arent enough of those to make Te Papa viable.

Wow, there are a few culture haters here. For a reasonable contribution through taxes and rates, we have very fine museums, libraries and galleries. Like other facilities, not everyone uses them. Maybe sometime in the future we will have the technology to charge every citizen on the basis of whatever they use, from parks and sports grounds to roads and footpaths. Until then, the nirvana of a museum-free city isn’t happening.

To a certain extent it’s like biting the hand that feeds you’ Te Papa brings a lot of people to the city, council should look at other areas to save money or charge for that matter. I bet a lot less people visit the City Art Gallery or city to Sea Museum (why not charge a entry fee for those of a couple of bucks).

Te Papa may be good economically and a great attraction.
But it’s overfunded and underefficient.
Full of overpaid and overbearing staff.
There is plenty of scope for cutting the funding.
And still having a good museum.

Well, having been to Wellington and visited Te Papa, my only contribution would be that it’s way over rated at the price. It’s “nice”, but very “Wellington”. That is, pretentious, over-rated, and largely paid for by someone else. I can’t now imagine making the trip from even, say, Porirua to Wellington just to go there.

I have to agree. Te Papa is pretty boring, and informative only on a very basic level compared to the old museum. The visiting exhibits are often worth seeing, but the others tend to be expensively over-curated to little point. Information accompanying items is sparse for fear of frightening the populace.

And it’s a money sink. I agree with the City Council, it’s time ratepayers’ money was treated with a little more respect. The local intelligensia love to see public money spent on theatres and the arts, institutions which benefit only a small proportion of ratepayers city-wide.

Te Papa is brilliant. As a building it is an awesome piece of work and the permanent exhibitions are very well done. I have yet to meet an overseas visitor than hasn’t be enthusiastic about it.
I’m not sure what gets some people going about it – too successful and not enough like the ‘old museum’?

Never set foot in the place, when they exhibited the Madonna in a condom that was it for me. And no I am not a Catholic, in fact I don’t like that institution at all. But the Madonna in a condom was personally very offensive. Imagine the uproar if they posted a picture of a Maori standing outside a TAB, fag in his/her mouth, and a bottle of beer in either thier right or left hand. And their benefit application in thier top pocket.

sub section 2.
Basically says that the tenants don’t pay rates. Indeed it makes it illegal to charge tenants rates so that makes the argument that rates are included in the rent simply not so. What you pay is for the use of the dwelling, not the use of council services.
Which you should be billed for.

Nice try, but that says the landlord doesn’t forward the rates bill to the tenant for payment.

If you are trying to tell me landlords don’t operate their rental properties in such a way that they make a net gain from their investment, you’ll have to excuse me for a moment while I duck for cover until these pigs have flown over…

I think people would pay a small entrance fee for Te Papa, although they normally have a fee for some of the specialist exhibits, so there is a balance to be had. Many major museums around the world have a small fee, although some like the Smithsonian don’t. A few dollars a person probably wouldn’t hurt.

This is one of a number of central government responsibilities foistered on local authorities to fund. I like Te Papa. It is a museum that everyone in the country (apart from a few jafas simply pissed it is not in Auckland) can be proud of. To me the only disappointing thing is that Frank Geary wasn’t chosen as the designer by the Rowling led committee but that said tourists and NZ visitors are complimentary of the museum and rate it as a well worthwhile place to visit.

Te Papa does not rate as an international museum. It really does not cut it as the national museum. They have huge collections of artifacts – in storage. The majority of displays never change and the style and tone is not very distinctive at all. There are far better museums in NZ that seem to have more relevance. Taranaki, Hawera (privately owned) Waiouru, Wigram, Southland and of course Auckland. A better name for Te Papa would be Te PC.